McMartin: Hunt for the lady in the southern landscape

Pete McMartin, Vancouver Sun05.26.2012

VANCOUVER , BC., May 24, 2012 -- Paul Wolsak alongside a reproduction of a painting of his mother in Vancouver, BC., May 24, 2012.
The painting hung in the Dutch national gallery for a long time, unknown to her family, and then was sold to a private patron. In 1977, after his mother died, Wolsak discovered a press clipping that showed the painting and has subsequently purchased it.
(Nick Procaylo/PNG)NICK PROCAYLO
/ PNG

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She looks out from the painting directly at you, fearless, beyond confident, even impatient, as if she were unconcerned with what you might think of her. She knows who she is.

She is in the bloom of her youth, and there is that about her that is both virginal — the concealing white dress — and sexually charged — the red necklace, the dark smoulder of her eyes, the flow of her body under the dress. This is what I am, her look seems to say, but what she is only she knows. A conundrum? The embodiment of the contradictions that all women carry? The artist was clearly fascinated by her.

Her name was Augusta Katherina Wilhelmina van Dorp. She was the product of an old and wealthy Dutch family, and at the time of the painting she was 21. She was fearsomely smart, could read and write both Greek and Latin, and spoke English, French, German and Malay fluently. She was also something of a wild child. When she came of age, she fled the confines of her upbringing as soon as she could. She left Holland and sailed, by herself, to Indonesia and what was then known as the Dutch East Indies. There, she became a teacher.

The painting of her, measuring an imposing 4 1/2 feet wide by six feet tall, is entitled Portrait of a Lady in Southern Landscape. It was painted by Gerard Röling, a prominent Dutch artist and teacher. Röling died in 1981.

Some time in the early 1930s, Röling and his wife were at a performance of the opera in Amsterdam, and there, sitting beside Röling’s wife, was Augusta. Röling, struck by Augusta’s looks, nudged his wife and asked her to strike up a conversation with her. The wife turned to Augusta, and after a while explained that her husband found her beautiful and wished to paint her portrait. Out of that chance meeting came Portrait of a Lady in Southern Landscape.

Soon after, Augusta would sail for Indonesia, and there, she would meet the man who would become her husband, Koss Wolsak, a Shell Oil executive. When the Second World War started, and the Japanese invaded Indonesia, Koss volunteered to stay behind to destroy all of the company’s records. By this time, they had two young sons, and Koss urged Augusta to leave Indonesia. She refused. She would not separate the family.

When the Japanese invaded, the family hid in the hills, but they were caught and interned in concentration camps on Java — Koss in a men’s camp, Augusta and the boys in a women’s camp. One boy was three, the other two weeks old.

They were imprisoned for four years. Koss nearly starved to death. In the last days of the war, Augusta was put on a ship bound for Japan, where she was to be a slave labourer. The day before the ship was to leave, the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The ship never sailed. Japan surrendered days later.

After recuperating from the war, Augusta would give birth to another son, Paul. The family would eventually leave Indonesia and return to Amsterdam in the early 1950s.

One day, Paul, who was then in his teens, found in his mother’s desk a press clipping from the 1930s. It was about a stunning painting by the promising new artist, Gerard Röling. Paul recognized his mother in the photo of the painting and confronted her with it.

“I said, ‘What the hell is this?’ ” Paul said. “But she just brushed it off.

“She had never said a word about it to any of us. My mother was very unassuming, and she most probably would have been highly embarrassed if the painting had been around for us to see. She was quirky that way.

“All she would say of it was that she had become friends with the Rölings, and that her parents didn’t want to buy the painting because they hadn’t commissioned it. She said she figured it had either been bought by the Museum of Modern Art in New York — because it had been exhibited there and at the Carnegie Museum [in Pittsburgh] — or the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.”

Augusta died in 1977 at age 65, of cancer. Paul, going through her effects, came across the clipping again and decided he would try to buy the painting. By this time, Paul was living in Vancouver, where he had come to study economics at the University of B.C.

He contacted his sister-in-law back in Amsterdam and asked her to approach the Stedelijk Museum about the painting.

“They stonewalled her,” Paul said, “and were very vague about it, and sent her off on a wild-goose chase about another painting Röling did of his wife.”

It was a dead end. The museum would not volunteer any information about it.

Paul let the matter drop.

Several years later, Paul was vacationing on the Caribbean island of Tobago, where he had a summer house. One day, on the beach, he met a married Dutch couple. They became friends. The wife, Carla Warners, was a tour guide with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The Van Gogh happened to be next door to the Stedelijk Museum.

Could she, Paul asked, make some inquiries for him about his mother’s painting? Yes, she said, she would be happy to.

Carla soon found out why the Stedelijk had been so unforthcoming. It had sold the painting at auction in 1944. Why? No reason was given. But the buyer had been a soap and candle manufacturer with no heirs, and when he died in the 1970s, it was resold by auction again, though there was no record of the auction house or who the new buyer was. Another dead end.

Carla, persevering, wrote Marta Röling, Gerard Röling’s daughter. She was a famous artist in her own right — a friend of the Dutch royal family and portraitist of Queen Beatrix.

Röling did not respond to Carla, who figured that Röling was too famous to reply to someone like her.

But a year later — this would have been in the late 1990s — a letter arrived from Röling. In it, she apologized profusely for not writing earlier, but she had been in the process of moving when her letter arrived, had misplaced it and had just then rediscovered it.

She wrote Carla that she had asked her mother, who was still alive, about the painting, and that her mother told her that, yes, she remembered the painting, and related the story of how she and her husband had met Augusta at the opera. As for the painting’s whereabouts, she had no idea.

Another dead end.

But a year later, Carla received another letter from Marta Röling.

“In it,” Paul said, “Röling writes, ‘Listen, this is a most coincidental thing, but I was at a cocktail party in Amsterdam, and there was the painting hanging on the wall. So I will ask permission of the owner if Paul can come and see the painting.’ ”

The owners agreed, and in a letter to Paul, told him that they had since moved from Amsterdam to their country home in the north of Holland, and that the painting was now there.

In 2001, Paul flew to Amsterdam and drove to the couple’s home. The man was a prominent Dutch architect, and the country home was “outrageously modern,” Paul said, its walls decorated with nothing but late 20th century art. There was no sign of Augusta’s portrait.

They sat talking in the living room, and the wife told Paul that the painting had been “foisted” on them, that it had been included in the sale of their house in Amsterdam. It had been too big for the painting’s previous owners to take with them to their new home, she said, and had left it behind.

“She was obviously not pleased with the whole situation,” Paul said of their conversation. “She said, ‘We don’t buy that old stuff!’ And she snidely said, ‘And we paid way too much money for it!’ ”

Oddly, the couple steered the conversation away from the painting. The husband seemed reluctant to discuss it.

He was led into the couple’s bedroom. There, on the wall on the husband’s side of the bed, was Augusta. She was the last thing the husband saw when he went to bed and the first thing he saw when he woke up.

When Paul saw the painting after 25 years of hunting for it, he was at once elated and stricken.

“I mean, gawd, I was overjoyed! There was the painting of mother! But when I saw it, it was the biggest letdown of my life, because it wasn’t mine.”

The man refused to sell it. He was clearly infatuated with it, Paul thought, and even, he suspected, in love with Augusta or what he felt Augusta to be. But he told Paul that he would put a codicil in his will that when he died, Paul would have first refusal at buying it.

“Every year thereafter,” Paul said, laughing, “I sent them a Christmas card and my business card.”

Three years ago, he phoned the wife and told her he would be visiting Amsterdam and would like to see the painting again. She said it would be impossible. Her husband was suffering from Alzheimer’s, she said, and he had been placed in a care home, and that the only thing that was keeping him calm there was the presence of the painting. He had taken it with him.

“But two months ago,” Paul said, “I got an email from the woman, who wrote that her husband had taken a turn for the worse, and that he was being hospitalized and there was no room for the painting there. Was I interested in buying the painting?”

She needn’t have asked. Paul wired her the money. He was reluctant to say what he paid for it.

The painting will arrive in late June.

“I don’t have a religion,” Paul said, “but I’m a firm believer that this is what the world does: Everything comes around. It was meant to be that it would come back.”

The Portrait of a Lady in Southern Landscape will hang in a sitting room wall of Paul’s apartment. The apartment is furnished with many of her antiques that were passed down to him, including a grand piano she bought for him as a child.

Paul, who has no children, has willed the painting to his two nieces, both of whom, he said, resemble his mother.

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